Lossy Compression
by bellmare
Summary: [n.] data encoding method that compresses data by losing some of it. Typically, a substantial amount of data can be discarded before the result is sufficiently degraded to be noticed. — Digital Devil Saga crossover, reincarnation; Serph, Souji, ensemble.


**Notes; Digital Devil Saga crossover, in which Souji is a reincarnated Serph. Man, I really like how this turned out. Because I enjoy writing characters suffering. In confusion. Spoilers for Digital Devil Saga 2 and the end of Persona 4. Also gratuitous use of quotation from DDS2.**

**.**

"Hey," Yosuke says.

Souji pretends he doesn't hear. He always does, when Yosuke's voice gets like that, strange and strained and thoughtful. It's raining again. Didn't it always rain before? Yeah, it probably did.

There were temples before, he thinks. A temple, a machine from which a god spoke of Nirvana, and a sea of milk that promised immortality, churned by a many-headed snake. Funny, that Ananta and Vasuki are now parts of him, masks he slips on and off with ease. Stranger still is the feeling that there's something missing, a god of death and the endless deeps who sees all from the stars, one who hangs liars by his noose.

"Man, are you okay? Maybe we should skip out on training today. You don't look too good," Yosuke's saying. He was different, too, in the rainy world. If Souji closes his eyes he thinks he can see someone else, someone with Yosuke's unruly hair but without his friendliness, someone who crushed the cobbles by his head with steely claws and snarled with two sightless heads.

Wait, what. Souji blinks and, oh, huh, there's Yosuke staring at him with a worried expression. "Heat," he blurts out and Yosuke's brow furrows. "What?"

_What?_ He doesn't know, either. Yosuke rubs the back of his neck. "Yeah, some warmth'd be nice on a day like this," he says after a moment's pause. He looks confused. Souji can't really blame him; he doesn't say much, anyway, everybody's always surprised when he has begins to talk.

Yosuke rubs his arms. "Man, it's cold. Wait, is that it, are you sick? Fever? The flu? Ate something weird from the fridge again?"

Souji shakes his head. The others laugh at him all the time for scavenging through the fridge, gulping down grass and gingerly crushing strange throat lozenges with his back teeth. He doesn't know why he does it; only that he needs to, that it's a necessity to survive. Beggars can't be choosers. Weren't they all beggars in the Junkyard?

The Junkyard.

Something flashes through his mind. Stony, cold, grey-washed. It smelled of corruption, it smelled of blood, it smelled of rot and metal and death. Well, he thinks, Inaba really isn't that different. He gets stomachaches here, too, always when he raids the fridge. There are many things that don't agree with his body. Tubs of pudding supporting their own ecosystem; chunks of gristly meat, sliding down his throat; he eats them all but he doesn't know what he's looking for.

"I'm fine," he says, taking Yosuke by surprise. "Fine," he repeats when Yosuke's brow furrows. He looks unconvinced. Souji isn't sure he's convincing anyone, least of all himself. How can he be fine when he's remembering people who were never there, when he's seeing ghosts all around him?

He's fine, fine. He's got to be.

.

Things don't quite match up any more.

"Just like me, then," Marie says, like it settles anything. Like it settles everything. "Maybe," Souji replies. There was a girl like her, too, he decides, a girl with black hair who didn't know the laws of their world. His world. Whichever world it was.

"So you feel like something's missing?" she prompts. Souji stares down at his hands, flexes his fingers experimentally and watches the skin tense across the back of his knuckles. Wasn't he wearing a ring? No, wait, he sold it. Wait, it was Yosuke's ring. Was it? Did Yosuke wear a tag ring too?

_I don't know,_ he thinks about saying. He shrugs instead. Actions speak louder than words, after all. He really doesn't know. Marie huffs in frustration. "Whatever, you're not very helpful. How can you help me find my memories if you're missing some to begin with?"

He's hurt her before, he thinks, just like that other girl, and he never meant to. What is it that they say, about myths, about dreams? That everything intersects, at some point.

"I dream sometimes," Marie's saying, gazing into the distance. She hugs her knees to her chest and stares into the sun and he thinks, irrationally, of flying into it. "I dream about things that might be memories. I dream about an ocean stirred beneath me and about fire. I dream about loss. I dream about being angry. But I'm not angry any more."

"Dreaming men are haunted men," he says. It's the longest sentence he's said for a very long time. It was her favourite phrase, wasn't it, because it made perfect sense. She knew things he didn't, just like he thinks Marie knows things he doesn't. Marie stares at him and nods, slowly, pensively.

"Yeah," she says and laughs shortly. "You got that right."

.

He dreams a lot nowadays, more than he used to. He dreams about Yosuke, only it's not Yosuke but a man who glares at him and demands answers. He dreams first about a man in a white coat who tells him people aren't tools, and then of someone else with angry red eyes and a fireball brand on his arm, pinning him to the ground. _Now you know where I stand,_ the Yosuke-who's-not-Yosuke says as he bleeds onto Souji's shoes and coughs up a bloody gobbet of phlegm. Oh, god, did Souji kill him? Oh, god. Wasn't there jealousy there, somewhere, mixed in with the regret? With the helplessness, with the frustration of not knowing?

He dreams about a Yukiko with too much sadness in her heart, a Yukiko with a scar running down the side of her face which she wears like a badge of pride. He dreams about a Yukiko perched atop jagged mounds of rubble with a sniper rifle cradled in her hands, polishing the guard. He dreams about a Yukiko with flat, grey eyes who snaps a soldier's neck with a deft twist, a Yukiko who later almost goes mad from hunger, a Yukiko who becomes the first amongst them to learn what it is to mourn.

He dreams of a Teddie who's a boy too young to be a soldier, a boy with an easy, cheerful lilt to his voice, a boy who likes to fly. A boy who likes cats, and silly jokes, a boy who flies himself into a plane for them right after he grins gently with a demon's jagged jaws and tells them to smile for one last time, just for him. In that world, Teddie was a boy who mourned the fallen and shouldered his grief the hardest, because he understood too much about loss, about death. He should never have been a soldier, should never have had to fight in that rain-washed world.

Yes, it all makes sense, both in this world and the other. Some things never change.

.

Everything overlaps, now. Souji isn't sure who is who or what is what, any more. One day he leads his tribe - no, his _team_ - into battle and the words tangle and snare in his mouth. _Gale,_ he says and Yosuke and Naoto stare at him in confusion. They cast garudyne and he shakes his head, wildly. The spell rebounds and he winces as the winds buffet, as their skin is scraped raw. No, no, it's all wrong. He stares straight at Naoto and makes a signal; agidyne, it means agidyne. Gale always liked fire. _Pyriphlegethon_, he means to say, cast Pyriphlegethon. Naoto stares at him like he's mad and says, "Souji-senpai, I do not comprehend" and he wants to laugh, he wants to cry, he wants to impale himself on his own sword.

"Maybe we should call it a day," Yukiko says after Yosuke shoves him out of the way of an Agneyastra.

(Titanomachia, he thinks, that's called Titanomachia. Not Agneyastra.)

.

"Are you really sure you're all right?" Chie prompts. It's so strange seeing her in this world, still alive, still well; stranger still is the knowledge that she's in his tribe - no, no, _team_, his team, that's what they are - didn't he and the others kill her in that world, because she was one of the first to submit to her hunger? She's always the same, no matter which world she's born into. Jinana never wanted to hurt anyone. Jinana never wanted needless slaughter. Chie, Jinana, they just wanted to protect - to protect - to protect who?

He tries to nod. She pats his shoulder worriedly. "Maybe we shouldn't spar today," she says, squinting at him. "I mean, we don't need to now, anyway! It's all good. We're strong enough. We're ready for this, for anything!"

Souji opens his mouth. He wants to tell her, _Argilla was so sad,_ but he doesn't even know who Argilla is.

.

He's seeing ghosts everywhere.

Sometimes he slips, and he calls Dojima _Lupa_; his uncle stares at him and laughs awkwardly and says things like, _maybe you're studying too hard, try to sleep earlier, won't you?_ and he nods tightly and stays up well into the night, staring at his ceiling. He tries not to think, _Roland_, when Kanji mulls over the sky, its distance, its endlessness, as he talks about past and future and philosophy as they ransack shadows for their teeth and scales and claws and horns. "'s my karma, I guess," Kanji says without thinking. "Y'know, like, kismet and shit like that. Fightin' with you guys, tryna find the killer, rescuing people, 's my karma for bein' a punk and all that. Gotta give back sometimes, y'know?"

It's a pity that Inaba's so small; he's got nowhere to escape to, nowhere that isn't shot through with rain, with memories that don't belong to him.

.

It's December and they've caught up with Adachi. It's December and everything's trickling through now.

"We're not that different, you and I," Adachi says. Souji thinks of someone with his face and his voice and black hair and dark eyes, someone with a cruel smile that fits him far too well. Souji feels like he's drowning. Magatsu Izanagi roars as Adachi rolls his neck languidly, loud enough for Souji to hear the bones go _crack, crack, crack_.

There were other Varnas, too, a real Varna, a false Varna, Varnas that wasn't his. There were three of him. Hope, despair and emptiness. He wonders which one he was, which ones the real and the fake were. There are two Izanagis here, one with his data corrupted, the other without. It's the same, just the same as it used to be.

_You're not me,_ he wants to say. _I'm not you, we're not the same._ Adachi laughs at his expression.

"This world isn't worth saving, you should remember that," Adachi says and cocks his gun. There's another memory, of the man that isn't him, of someone that's him and not him, with a pistol pointed at the Yosuke-that-isn't-Yosuke. No, no, that's not him. That wasn't him.

"People aren't worth saving," Adachi's saying. The skies around him are washed a sickly red-yellow-black; like a bruise that's broken the skin, like cracking open an egg and finding something small and wrinkled and bloodshot curled in the albumen. "They're just tools, better for nothing other than doing whatever you want them to. Isn't that right?"

Izanagi doesn't feel like him, not any more. Souji misses the other part of him that's not there, the part of him he'll never be able to reclaim, the god of the drowned. Lightning isn't his element. It never was. Ice, it was always ice because it doesn't flow, because it's always frozen in the past.

Was that a price of reincarnation, he wonders. Was it the price he paid for everyone he's killed, for all the karma he's accrued. Was losing Varna the price for living in another world of eternal rain, watching as the wheel of karma continues to spin.

"It's simple, really," Adachi says. "The human heart is a machine. We can predict the outcome of any action. To study the body, you cut it open; to study the mind, you isolate it by crushing the heart. Or didn't you ever learn things like that?"

.

"Angel," he says.

It's raining. It's always raining. It's the twentieth of March and there's a goddess before him. She smiles and it's cold and cruel and mirthless - just like he remembers.

"I've watched you nurture that seed I've sown in you, over the course of the year," Izanami says. Everything about her is the same. _I'm giving humanity what it wants. To survive. To live on. To forget its petty squabbles amongst itself._ "Do you think it was a waste?"

He doesn't know. He doesn't know anything any more.

"Do you finally understand, how emotion influences action? Everything that happened this year, was a result of the sway emotion has over you, over hope and emptiness and despair. Mankind will always repeat its mistakes, just as you did. Just as you always will. Will you continue to fight towards Nirvana?"

He thinks of a world that doesn't rain, a world without memories that shift and overlap and dissipate like darting fish when he tries to pursue them. Maybe the next time, it'll be a softer world, a gentler world; a Nirvana that doesn't involve the sacrifice of - of - who? Sera? Marie?

"Yes," he says. Izanami smiles.

"The bell shall sound, awakening the sleeping one," she says. Souji doesn't know who she means. Maybe it's him. He's the sleeping one. Dreaming men are haunted men.


End file.
